“The Little Foxes” at the Young Vic
Jeremy Malies on the South Bank
18 December 2024
Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes covers themes including indentured or coerced labour, cousin marriage, patriarchy in terms of inheritance, and the attempted swindling of an invalid. Other topics are passive violence and female agency. Its social relevance ought to make it a play for today, but I found myself wondering why the piece has been revived and whether it has always come across with the clunkily didactic tone as in this handling by director Lyndsey Turner.
Steffan Rhodri, Stanley Morgan and Mark Bonnar.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
As written, the action takes place in 1900. When Anna Madeley, playing alcoholic Birdie who has inherited an Alabama plantation, talks about her sainted father dying bravely in combat, you assume it was the Civil War. But here, Lizzie Clachan’s muted minimalist and almost monochrome set could be as late as 1950. I found myself consistently distracted as I pondered the backdrop, and anachronisms such as a doctor serving an affluent family travelling to treat a dying patient using horse and buggy. A dramaturg (none is credited) could have helped matters along with some tweaks.
None of this would have mattered had I been more engrossed by the machinations of the plot in which Birdie’s dishonest husband Oscar (played by Steffan Rhodri) schemes with her brother-in-law Benjamin (Mark Bonnar) to create a modern get-rich-quick cotton production project with commercial guidance from a Chicago business guru.
The brothers are outmanoeuvring their sister, Regina, the choice role here famously played (stage and screen versions) by Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Greer Garson, Anne Bancroft, Elizabeth Taylor, and Stockard Channing.
John Light and Anna Madeley.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
Enter Anne-Marie Duff who is magnetic, imposing, and even space-displacing as Regina. I saw no distance between her and the lines which seem to be improvised as she scrapped with daughter Alexandra, played by the equally impressive Eleanor Worthington-Cox. At the end when Regina has outwitted the brothers but abused, in fact more or less murdered, her invalid husband Horace (John Light) and permanently alienated her child, she approaches the stature of a Shakespearean tragic figure though one with no hope of redemption. Duff in her blood-red gown conveys all of this and her shriek of “I wanted the world!” is reminiscent of Lady Macbeth.
Light is also excellent and shows admirable technique in that he must express wide-ranging emotions while using a wheelchair for much of the action before crawling across the stage in his death throes while Regina sits stock-still and sneers at him. Light communicates his character’s innate decency and concern for the household’s servants, and in doing so underlines Hellman’s socialist and humanitarian concerns which are also treated in her play Watch on the Rhine.
On press night we were eight minutes into the action when Birdie’s son Leo, played by Stanley Morgan, collapsed on stage. Fortunately, after a delay of 50 minutes, he was fit to continue, and proceeded to nail his role. It was all the more impressive in that later on the plot demands that Leo should be manhandled a great deal by the older male characters.
So why does all of this not quite coalesce? Turner calibrates the pace well with the almost constant rows being allowed to simmer down so that the play can breathe. And she ensures that the action never veers into melodrama despite there being potentially melodramatic content. Voice and dialect coach Rebecca Gausnell eases the cast through elongated vowels without anybody descending into syrupy drawl or exploding diphthongs. (In her directions, Hellman asks for Southern dialect but says she is making no attempt to reproduce it phonetically in the text.)
Sound designer Tingying Dong skilfully hints at cotton-processing elsewhere on the plantation. And there is certainly a sense of industry. Perhaps my problem is recurring confusion as to sense of time? The action could be taking place in a vacuum which has some logic given the primal nature of the disputes going on. But if there is an expressionistic element to Turner’s approach (and I’m therefore wrong to be focused on period) I think it’s misguided and unsuited to this play. I wanted more representation of the South. I didn’t expect a steaming bayou and Antebellum artefacts but was hoping for a sense of place. I think Hellman might have wanted it too.
